the week of january 5-11, 2024
'tis the january festival season
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This newsletter rivals The Luminaries in length (I’m publicly vowing to finally read that book this year!) so your email may cut it off — as always, you can view it on the full site.
icymi: year in review & bills, bills, bills
I wrote my annual year-in-review post for paid subscribers, charting the best and worst moves in the regional theatre game of thrones, the board clownery, The Crisis™, and the incremental progress and kernels of hope. (Free subscribers can read the intro):
This month’s Bills, Bills, Bills money diary is from an NYC-based admin worker with a farm share and $100K in a brokerage account. I found myself shuddering in recognition at the ramshackle non-profit workplace details. (When I was a literary manager, I had to use a broken computer for eleven months because the organization was like, “We can’t afford to replace it, sorry you can’t access your script database anymore!” Theatre is a truly unserious business.)
My Howlround essay on the development and learnings of The Artistic Caucus was one of the site’s top 10 most-read articles of 2023. Thanks to everyone who read part one of my magnum opus on this project. This is excellent motivation to finish writing the second essay in the series once I’m out of rehearsals! (More on that in a sec.)
productions
Sun Mee Chomet’s How to Be A Korean Woman is now playing through January 14th at Theater J in DC. Zaraawar Mistry directs and dramaturgs the solo performance — told from the perspective of an adult Jewish adoptee — that “uses text, music, and movement to explore themes of family, love, adulthood, and the universal longing to know one's past.”
Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is now playing at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia. Matt Pfeiffer directs the Idaho-set drama about a mortgage broker and client bonding over the “chokehold of financial insecurity and precariousness of fatherhood.”
Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love starts previews January 10th at Studio Theatre in DC. David Muse directs the dark comedy following a pair of married Boomers over four decades, “from free love to middle-class comfort to well-compensated retirement—when their adult daughter accuses them of squandering the world they inherited.”
The Wooster Group and Eric Berryman’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me runs January 11 - February 3 at NYC’s The Performing Garage. The original work “exploring Toasts, the distinctive, virtuosic genre of Black American storytelling” is directed by Kate Valk.
Anna Ouyang Moench’s In Quietness starts performances January 11th at A Red Orchid in Chicago. dado directs the 2016 work about a high-powered consultant ditching her career to follow her born-again husband to a Southern Baptist seminary, where she learns to be a docile homemaker.
The world premiere of Rachel Bonds’ Jonah starts previews January 11th at Roundabout. The “singularly haunting and heart-racing coming-of-age tale about the true cost of survival and the lengths some will travel to feel just a little less alone in the world” is directed by Danya Taymor.
A personal request to all my NYC subscribers: I need you to see Jonah because I’m in Boston for the next six weeks — I’m dramaturging Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain at The Huntington (!!), many zero-chill missives on this dream collaboration to come — and I want Jonah to extend so I can make it up before closing. My theatre-going schedule aside, you shouldn’t need influencing to see this one: I read an early draft a few years ago and Rachel’s writing is so gorgeous, surprising, and emotionally precise, plus this production stars the brilliant genius Gabby Beans. (If I was a publicist, which I’m not, I’d be pitching publications a feature on how Rachel has two NYC premieres this winter/spring — Jonah and the musical The Lonely Few at MCC.)
festivals
The 2024 Under the Radar Festival runs January 5-21 at various locations across NYC. Here is this year’s line-up:
South African performance artist Albert Ibokwe Khoza’s The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu at NY Live Arts (January 11-13)
Tania El Khoury’s interactive live art project Cultural Exchange Rate at The Invisible Dog Art Center (January 11-21)
Sister Sylvester’s The Eagle and the Tortoise, “a live sound and video installation where [the audience] collectively read a hand-made book”, at BRIC (January 11-21)
Pan Pan’s The First Bad Man, “a book club based on the novel by Miranda July” at Lincoln Center (January 5-13)
Japanese director Yi Murai & Kaimaku Pennant Race Theater Company’s Hamlet | Toilet, an “antic and highly stylized movement-based reimagining of the Shakespeare classic” at Japan Society (January 10-13)
Italian performance collective Motus’ Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate at La MaMa (January 10-15)
Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s Open Mic Night, “a long goodbye to an imaginary experimental theater that takes the form of experimental theater itself”, at Performance Space NY/Mabou Mines (January 5-18)
The Arlekin Players Theatre production of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class at BAM Fisher (January 12-21)
Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities at Theatre for a New Audience (January 17-21)
Krymov Lab NYC’s production of Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” In Our Own Words at BRIC (January 10-21)
Jessica L. Hagan and Ryan Calais Cameron’s “knowingly sharp and riotously funny choreopoem” Queens of Sheba at Lincoln Center (January 5-13). This was one of my favorite things I saw at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe.
Philadelphia artist John Jarboe’s cabaret ROSE: You Are Who You Eat, “a celebration and re-digestion of gender and family” at La MaMa (January 10-20). If you live in DC, you can catch it at Woolly Mammoth this June.
Inua Ellams’ Search Party, “a uniquely futuristic and puckishly chaotic interactive event”, at Lincoln Center (January 5-13)
Nile Harris’s this house is not a home, “a frenzied rant of online logic delivered outside an inflatable mausoleum,” at Abrons Arts Center (January 6-14)
Dynasty Handbag’s Titanic Depression, “a one-woman (and one octopus) multimedia dark comedy extravaganza” at New York Live Arts (January 14-20)
Luke Murphy’s Volcano, a voyeuristic journey that’s “part theater, part dance, part sci-fi thriller” at St. Ann’s Warehouse (January 10-21)
Cliff Cardinal’s radical retelling of As You Like It at NYU Skirball (January 12-13)
The Exponential Festival runs January 5-February 3 at various locations in NYC. Here’s the line-up for the festival dedicated to emerging artists working in experimental performance:
Marissa Joyce Stamps’ Being Up in Here and All the Other Businesses that Don’t Concern You OR When You See a Buncha Black People Running, What Do You Do? (The Brick, January 5-13)
thingNY’s Natural Studies, a double bill from the “collective of composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation” (The Brick, January 18-20)
Salomé Egas’ Más que un Pétalo (More than a Petal), “a multidisciplinary theatrical experience deconstructing the Ecuadorian immigrant experience in the United States” directed and dramaturged by Brynne O’Rourke (The Brick, January 23-27)
Yuki Kawahisa’s ten dreams of metamorphoses or me talk dirty someday, “a vulnerable, sensual and silly solo that’s part storytelling, part dance, part poetry” co-directed by Caleb Hammond and dramaturged by Tina Rosner (The Brick, January 31-February 3)
Shawn Escarciga’s Admin Reveal: An Evening With Miss Lady Salad (The Brick, January 25-27)
Sour Milk’s DIRT, “a hybrid game and performance, where participants transform a newly exposed slice of NYC” (Loading Dock, January 17)
The performance collective Banana Bag & Bodice’s Hubris Always Gets You In The End (Target Margin; January 6, 12, 13, 19, & 30)
Cristina Pitter’s performance installation and ceremony ixchel (we are still here, remember this medicine ) at JACK (January 10-13)
Chris Ignacio’s digital puppetry project Manifesting Monsters on the festival’s YouTube Channel (January 15)
Kennie Zhou’s mockumentary Puppymoon on the festival’s YouTube Channel (January 22)
Lindsey Hope Pearlman / BREAD Arts Collective’s ROAR!, “an original rock musical based on a true story about the making of the most dangerous, most expensive home movie in Hollywood history” at Cloud City (January 11-13)
The Million Underscores’ THOSE MOVEABLE PIECES, “a slow dance, a workout sequence, a slapstick routine, superstitious rituals and daily processions” at We Are Here Bushwick (January 11-14)
Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams’s Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods (directed by Tara Elliott) at Loading Dock (January 5, 6, 11-13)
A rough cut screening of Kyoung’s Pacific Beat’s new work-in-progress NERO, “a Shakespearean, five-act “streamplay” theatricalizing the history from George W. Bush’s War on Terror to our present day as the rise and fall of Nero’s Roman Empire” at Brick Aux (February 1)
The world premiere of Heather Christian’s Terce: A Practical Breviary runs January 10-20 at HERE as part of the Prototype Festival. Keenan Tyler Oliphant directs the “wild meditation/celebration of the sacred mothers alive in all of us and how that manifests in regard to the Earth, each other, and ourselves, sung by a community choir of 30-plus caregivers and makers.”
The Perlberg Festival of New Plays runs January 5-7 at Palm Beach Dramaworks. This year’s readings include Harrison David Rivers’ Proximity, Andrew Rosendorf’s Stockade, Oren Safdie’s Color Blind, Ted Malawer’s Everything Beautiful Happens at Night, and Kirsten Greenidge’s Little Row Boat.
digital/streaming
James Dennen, Christian Faur, Brianna Rhodes, Michael “Blakk Sun” Powell, and ETHEL’s new work Like Leaves. Like Carrots. premieres January 12-13 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. The response to Waiting for Godot combines musical, visual, theatrical, and virtual elements—with interference from artificial intelligence. (If you are interested in attending the performance in virtual reality (VR), please send a request for information to likeleaveslikecarrots@gmail.com.)
playwrights
Theater Mu in Minneapolis announced the second iteration of its playwright incubator Mu Tang Clan. The 2023-24 cohort members are Cindy Koy, Mai Moua Thao, Sunny Thao, and Ehkhudah Zar. Mellon playwright-in-residence Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay designed and facilitates the initiative serving Asian-American playwrights who identify as refugees, former refugees, or descendants of refugees.
